Skateboarding has become a popular sport and pastime for persons of all ages, and especially for boys and girls of teen and preteen age. Skateboarding combines the appeal of surfboarding with that of conventional rollerskating, and offers the advantage to participants that it can be engaged in both at specially designed tracks and along sidewalks and other existing hard surfaces. Little or no special equipment is required other than the board itself; though, for safety's sake, a helmet and protective pads for knees and elbows are recommended.
Typical conventional skateboards comprise surfboard-like planar elliptical decks having upper surfaces for supporting a user and undersurfaces to which front and rear wheeled trucks attach with cushioned and pivotal connections to give weight-shift control for steering and acrobatic maneuvers. Such boards are frequently also provided with protective guard strips and rails at their front and side edges, and with braking stop bumpers at their tails. While not considered a group sport as such, skateboarding is a fun activity which can be shared at social gatherings and which promotes interaction among peers.
Before the rise in popularity of skateboarding, teens and preteens often played with a springboard toy, known as a "pogo stick." The pogo stick comprises a telescoping tubular stilt with pedals and a spring, used to move along a path in a series of leaps and bounds, with the user engaging in up and down hopping motions to reciprocate one part of the stilt axially relative to another against the bias of the spring.